Fish tale
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A piece of chu-toro (medium fatty tuna)served by Jiro. |
Like many have said before, eating at Jiro is like enjoying edible music, a movement of sorts. Opening with hirame (flat fish or halibut), the meal starts off rocky. The fish tastes funky and sour. I was so sure that it had to be an unlucky fluke, a three-star Michelin restaurant serving a piece of funky sour fish. Despite the taste, the texture was among the best for any piece of flat fish ever: The meat fell apart with every bite.
The same sourness lingered with the next few pieces, though the ika (squid) and shima-aji (striped jack) had the right texture - none of that rubberiness that often plagues ika.
But when the maguro (tuna), the holy grail of sushi came, it was like the music changed: from a dark, deep and somber tone to a booming crescendo that ends with a sweet mellow note: The tuna trio made sense of everything. The first piece, the akami (regular tuna) was flavorful, rich and succulent. Since akami is a leaner cut of sushi, the meat had a nice crispness to it with every bite.
The sourness of the sauce, meanwhile, adds to the rich flavor of the akami, and it worked wonders with the chu-toro (medium fatty tuna). Chu-toro, normally my favorite piece of sushi, is hard to eat in large amounts as the fatty flavor of the fish eventually starts to become too much. However the sourness of the sauce aided the melt-in-your-mouth texture of the fish, and it gave it a fresh finish. That makes it possible to consume multiple pieces of chu-toro and its even fattier brother, the o-toro (fatty tuna).
Words cannot express the grandeur of Jiro's o-toro.
While each of the next wave of pieces is worth its own paragraph, two stand out as reaching godliness: the uni (sea urchin) and the tamago (egg).
The uni was far different from any other bite of sea urchin I've ever consumed. In Japan, many who eat uni compare it to eating fishy ice cream. Sweet, mellow, with a salty goodness to it. Eating it at Jiro was different. There was no fishy aftertaste - the salty goodness tasted lightly and pleasantly of the sea.
The uni completely overshadows the next series of pieces, from the kobashira (baby scallops) all the way to the anago (sea eel), but each of these pieces was paving the way for the last piece of sushi, the tamago (egg).
It's said that an apprentice at Jiro must master making the egg omelet before ever being allowed to even touch fish, and that this process takes years. It's no wonder that Jiro's students are doing well for themselves. The egg, delicate and firm, tastes like a piece of cake. It is beyond fluffy but not so fluffy that it breaks apart at the slightest touch.
